Adventure .1 - Monkeys, Mountains and Mayan Myths

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After a week in Xela, I decided that I needed to do something a little different for the weekend before starting Spanish classes. And where better to begin my Guatemalan travels than Lago de Atitlan, which everybody here has been raving about since I arrived? I got up early and caught the microbus to Minerva terminal, where various helpful drivers directed me to the bus to Panajachel. It was a forty minute wait on the bus, during which time vendors scrambled on and off, pushing up and down selling ice creams, sweets, tortillas, newspapers, drinks and essentially anything else portable. The journey took a few hours, then from Panajachel I caught a tuk-tuk to La Reserva Natural Atitlan.

This is a privately owned park set in secondary forest over a coffee plantation. Trails across the hillside are connected by hanging bridges and zip wires, and there is a viewing platform complete with spider monkeys. They aren't exactly wild monkeys though, they were liberated from the illegal pet trade at that difficult age when they stop being cute and start spraying everything with hormones. At least the reserve provides them with a reasonable amount of space and unlimited bananas. There are also hummingbirds flitting between brighty coloured flowers, and butterflies in a variety of vivid hues. Where the park stretches down to the lake, there are coots sitting demurely on the waves and a view across the surface of the water to the other side, where two volcanoes stand almost in line so it looks like one is casting a shadow on the sky. A lot of people say that this is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but I prefer the glacial lakes of Canada to this extreme, majestic landscape. The lake is so large it could be the sea, particularly when the blue mist is semi-obscuring the opposite side.

After exploring and eating my sandwich in the reserve, I tuk-tuk'd back to Panajachel and caught the lancha to San Pedro. Due to a tricksy wind, the lake is almost as wavy as the sea and this was quite a bumpy ride. In San Pedro, I checked in to Mr Mullet's Hostal before having a little wander round the bottom part of the town. It's a slightly surreal place. A bit like Zakopane in Poland, almost everything seems to be geared towards the many tourists. There are also quite a lot of people here who came as tourist and somehow failed to leave, so many of the businesses are now entirely run by non-Guatemalans. Later in the evening, I went out to one of these (The Buddha Bar) with some other people from the Hostal, though the place was closed for some unspecified reason by the police at a little before twelve.

In the morning, I got up at about half five and went to meet the guide who was taking me up San Pedro volcano. (It was too early in the morning and I promptly forgot his name.) I had thought that I was signing onto a group walk, but apparently not. Fortunately, though he seemed very young he was the kind of person that will talk for ten or twenty minutes at a time, which was good for me as I was swiftly out of breath and 'Ah, si' was about all I could mostly manage. He told me a few of the stories of his Tz'utujil Maya people. This one is as I understood it through my bad Spanish:

A long time ago there was a monster that lives by the lake, and this was a terrible monster that used to take a little girl every day and eat her. If the little girls didn't follow the instructions of their elders and go to be eaten, the monster made huge problems for the people of the town. However, there was an old man in the town who had lots of sons, but only one daughter, and he really didn't want to lose his one precious daughter to the monster. When the time came for his daughter to go the the monster, the old man disguised himself as a little girl and went in her place. He was eaten by the monster and fell into the monster's stomach, which was completely full of all the little girls he had eaten. But the resourceful old man had brought some sticks with him and he started dancing about in the monster's stomach, hitting it with the sticks, so that it began to feel sick. It couldn't understand why, so it went to eat the next little girl but the man kept dancing and the monster felt more sick so that little girl survived. The man danced and hit and danced and hit until the monster became so ill that he was violently sick in the middle of the lake and never troubled the town again.

Of course, he told it with a lot more detail about what the monster looked like, where it was sick etc but I think that's the general idea. The ascent took around four and a half hours and by the end of it I was utterly exhausted and moving so slowly that haze from the lake had risen to obscure the view by the time I reached the top. It's lucky I started with one of the smaller mountains and didn't dive straight in at Tajumulco!

It took the rest of the morning and early afternoon to climb back down again, during which time my latent clumbsiness was on full show, not helped by the fact that the paths were a dry, fragile dust. He explained that there was quite a severe drought here last year. Stretches of land that were expected to give twenty or thirty untis of something were giving only three or four. This year, people are planting and hoping for the rain, but so far there hasn't been any, even though it's normally fairly frequent.

The hike completed, I checked out of Mr Mullet's and tried to get on the bus to Xela. I was cheerfully informed that there was nothing until the morning, so I got the boat again back to Panajachel. There were no buses from there either (despite what it says in the guide book), so I caught one to Sololá, then another to Los Encuentros, and then another to an unspecified road junction just outside of Xela. There may have been a bus from there, but I didn't fancy hanging about in an empty, dark spot for an unspecified amount of time, so I got in the only taxi and paid all of my remaining cash to get back to the Parque Centro America.

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Comments

[Ros]

Monster fun
These get better every time. Feel free to share another of his myths if you have the chance. Sounds like altitude made the hike pretty tough. I wonder if you will adjust to it eventually.